Mass Effect 3 Interview

SFX chatted up BioWare’s Casey Hudson on the subject of the highly anticipated final chapter in Commander Shepard’s action-packed sci-fi RPG/TPS trilogy, Mass Effect 3. The interview includes questions dealing with the influences on the Mass Effect team, the role of Earth in the title’s narrative, the consequences of losing team members in Mass Effect 2’s ending and more. Here’s a sampling:

SFX: The third game in the trilogy is going to bring to a head the story we’ve been following for years what’s at stake here? This is a big deal for you guys, rounding everything off.

Casey Hudson: It is. We wanted to make a whole trilogy, we wanted to build the biggest thing we possibly could. What we worked on with the Star Wars games we loved the scale of that. We wanted to do something that was at least as big and exciting in scale. It was almost too much to put into one game! We also wanted our fans to know that they could become invested in it because there would be more. We’re now on the other end of that where we’ve built everything we’ve wanted to build and we just really need to bring it home and finish it in a way that is going to be satisfying to our fans and to us.

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SFX: Dragon Age seem to learn a lot from Mass Effect. Has Mass Effect 3 benefited from anything else your company is producing? Is there much change in how the game is designed?

Hudson: We share a lot of people between the teams. We definitely have a productive rivalry! We’ll try things out the Mass Effect dialogue, for instance; originally Dragon Age didn’t use the (dialogue wheel). Then they saw some of the benefits. We look at each other’s games and try and integrate new things. With Mass Effect 3, if we are doing anything different it’s because there is a resounding energy and feedback from the fans that are playing it. We’ve made a lot of changes to the visual engine over the years. People saw a lot of changes in Mass Effect 2 and you’ll see that sort of difference again in Mass Effect 3. At some stages there is only so much you can do to improve! But the graphics and frame rate will be better and that means we can put more enemies on screen. There are things that are a little more fluid.